unchosen
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: [AT] When Ken dies in Osamu's place, the elder Ichijouji has to take the burden of his brother's destiny. But how can he, when he'll never truly be Chosen?
1. the silence at his funeral screamed like

**A/N:** Written for the Becoming the Tamer King Challenge: Training Peak Task, and for the What if Challenge, "What if Ken died instead of Osamu?" Both challenges are on the Digimon Fanfiction Challenges Forum (link's in my profile).

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**unchosen  
1. the silence at his funeral screamed like nails on a chalkboard**

The Sakura blossoms had dried out, leaving their stems scratched and bare. The refuse cacked like flakes of paper beneath their feet, almost inaudible in the howling winter wind – but he heard the paper as silent screams, and his steps were foolishly tentative because of it. Yet he stepped on, wandering aimlessly simply to hear the screams digging fine-point needles through his skin.

Paper could not scream; nor could dried Sakura blossoms. He knew this, and even if he wished to do so he could not delude himself to think it otherwise. Perhaps that was a fallacy of his. If he could not see or touch or taste or smell or hear, then it did not exist – or so he had believed, _thought _he had believed. Except his brother had been able to prove he hadn't, and their relationship had died for it.

Not Ken though; he'd died for Osamu:_ his_ life, shoving him away from the car as hard as a nine year old could shove; his lies, calling out his brother's falsehood even when he knew it to be the truth; his stress and frustration that had erupted into anger and fired at the comforter instead of the enemy lines… and his _God damned _pride that had held his tongue in check thereafter.

If he could have gotten away with it, he wouldn't have even come; he didn't have that right, or that strength. Not that strength had much of a place when innocence died. Most present only knew his brother's face, that cherubic face with baby fat still clinging to his cheeks and those doe blue eyes that seemed to eternally search out souls to touch with its never-ending vat of light. But they were still crying in the crowd while Osamu hid apart, thinking of how the dead Sakura blossoms wailed in near-silence under his feet and why he'd been deaf to his brother's more obvious screams.

But soon the refuse of the Sakura had been reduced into something finer than paper yet coarser than dust, and could no longer wail. And the newfound reprieve wrapped in the howls of the wind made his skin crawl; the silence itself screamed, worse than the dying wails of dried Sakura blossoms. It was fresh agony, fresh like the teeth-grinding sound of nails on a chalkboard, and when he felt unbidden tears he brushed them angrily aside and suffered the biting flakes and resultant stings from the bare Sakura tree instead.

No-one reprimanded him. No-one reached for him, except his father – a silent tall figure in the sun supporting his mother.

Osamu did not go, though the long-since tainted desire for that comfort crawled beneath the needle pricks before he could reject it.


	2. the days that followed sunk into a deep

**A/N:** Written for the Becoming the Tamer King Challenge: Training Peak Task, and for the What if Challenge, "What if Ken died instead of Osamu?" Both challenges are on the Digimon Fanfiction Challenges Forum (link's in my profile).

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**unchosen  
2. the days that followed sunk into a deep aching pain**

In the days that followed his little brother's funeral, Osamu learnt the meaning of a broken heart.

He had loved his brother more than anything in the world, but it had been a secret, forbidden love. Not the sort of forbidden love the world had given a grossly romantic or deeply stigmatised name. Not the love driven by physical desire and affection, like much of what the world called love in its ignorant tongue. No; to most people, it was an ordinary, unimpressive love: the love an elder brother gave the younger, from the moment they saw those sweetly innocent eyes blink up.

But for Osamu who had thrown his heart away for his studies, for that picture-perfect child the world seemed to crave, his brother had been the only one to stay close. He'd force Osamu away from hours of monotonous numbers and words to the real world, the outside world. He'd forced him to look away from the dull but understandable grey of existence to the mysterious colours beyond.

And Ken loved those colours; he'd appreciated them in a way that Osamu never had, and could never do. For Osamu, the hole he had dug for himself and been buried within was only six feet deep with crumbling, sloping walls. A slight touch caused the soil to run in a stream of grey with a fragile hiss, pre-empting the creak above. Of late, the creaks had been more audible, more ominous. Splinters had rained down…and he'd been selfish enough to leave Ken down there with him. Ken had brought some colour; spots of red that bled slowly into thin winding streams; ink trails left by the deforming red pen whose task it was to correct imperfection.

Osamu had been the one looking for perfection. Now he ached for it; that gaping hole where his heart had once been was his achievement thereof. Because Ken had been the one to always pull him back, the one to reply a frown with a smile and a blank paper with colourful crayon doodles. But no there was nothing but the black hole of his own making and a dull echo in his soul. Nothing but the grey-tinted visor through which he saw the entire world. No marring colour that could pull him into a world if blissful dreams, nor tears that could drown him in the ocean deep.

If only he could have cried…but he didn't deserve that reprieve. Only the guiltless deserved to wash away their sorrow with those tears. The empty echo of the house, its grey-washed walls, were of his own doing. He'd driven the only person he really loved away – and the force by which the elastic snapped back had killed him.

Ken, sweet innocent little Ken, had probably thought it was all his fault.


End file.
